Google foxed by Lowestoft's tides

Just east of All Saints and St Margaret's Church in Pakefield there's a row of ships, reaching out to the sandbar.

There's a couple of barges, several RIBs, and, disappearing from a mobile cable-corner thing, into the grey almost flat-calm sea, a cable.

This is Google's fibre optic cable, successfully laid under the seabed, all the way from Belgium. Successful, that is, until it reached our tricky coastal waters.

I was told that the cable had been shifted by the 'unexpectedly powerful' off-shore tidal pull. They were - 11am today, 20th July 2021 – trying to gently ease the cable into its correct alignment, allowing it to nestle in its seabed trench.

Only when this task has been completed can the onshore part of the operation be done, pulling the cable through the already laid three-metre-deep ducting under the beach to its connection with the rest of the network.

It has to be effected by Friday or otherwise the whole operation has to be postponed until the beginning of September. This has already happened with Google's trans-Atlantic effort, which failed to make landfall in Cornwall last week. Rumour and my imagination has it that in Cornwall the problem was not having a big enough spade or some other vital piece of equipment.

As well as seaman, divers and a myriad of technical persons on the site (most of them on the ships and boats, of course) there's an archaeologist and a marine biologist watching the work. The archaeologist will be examining the 50 metres or so of the trench from low-water mark to the already in situ ducting. The biologist, also a diver, I understand, is there to make sure there's no accidental damage done to any rare plants, and I imagine he has been checking the seabed too.

Lowestoft Old and Now will endeavour to keep you posted.